


The Boy On The Train

by Devilc



Category: Band of Brothers
Genre: M/M, Military, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-08
Updated: 2010-01-08
Packaged: 2017-10-06 00:13:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,599
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/47564
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Devilc/pseuds/Devilc
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Because even my husband commented on how slashy this scene was.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Boy On The Train

**Author's Note:**

> This is a story I felt somewhat uneasy about writing. It's Band of Brothers slash. I feel somewhat uncomfortable writing something RPSey, even though this is much more about how one person is portrayed as a character, and this is a study of that that character, not the real person.
> 
> Anyhow the scenes of Captain Winters on the metro during his leave in Paris gave birth to this. As soon as the episode ended I sat down and banged this out.
> 
> I reckon the boy on the train is 16, maybe 17.
> 
> And no, this is not very graphic.

He sits in a cafe drinking coffee, trying to figure out why the hell he came to Paris.

Okay, he knows. His fellow officers, his friends, thought it would be good for him. He's been at the front too long. But he's here by himself, and Paris is so ... quiet's not the right word. It's just that the sounds he's come to take as a given: gunfire, shelling, men grumbling and cursing, and howling, the buzz of planes over head, the rumble of trucks and tanks, aren't here. Okay, there are trucks lumbering through the streets of Paris, but the overall noise is one of people. People on the streets talking and laughing and having a good time. The smells he's used to are different, too. Here it's the smell of people, and fresh baked bread, and coffee, and perfume, and all the smells of a city, instead of the smell of gunpowder, hot metal, the acrid stench of fear, stagnant water, and damp, cool earth.

And what a terrible thing it is to think of the smell of gunpowder and the sound of artillery as normal things he thinks.

And what a terrible thing it is to be alone in a strange city with nothing to do but think.

On the line, he thinks, as the metro shakes and clacks, and the lights strobe black white black white black white, there is no time for thinking. Check that. No time for extra thinking. No time to sit trapped in the cinema of the mind, with the events of days past playing like a bit of looped film, while you try and make sense of them. There are no cafes, or neatly pressed uniforms, and out there thinking does not dwell on the past, and never extends much more than 5 minutes into the future.

There is a boy sitting on a train. Dirty and tired, his dark clothes worn and tattered. Huge black eyes dominate the gaunt whiteness of his face. The war has not been easy on this one. He looks as if he hasn't had a good, gut bustingly full meal in years.

He nods, gravely, in appreciation and recognition. He smiles shyly and gives a respectful salute, but his whole demeanor is one of solemnity and deep rooted sorrow. He clutches a bundle to his chest.

The subway clacks and rocks, the lights strobe by, black white black white black white, thoughts play like looped film. He thinks of the German sentry he shot a few days ago by that crossroads by that dike, in Holland. In his mind's eye, the face of the sentry becomes the face of this solemn boy on the train. The sentry couldn't have been more than 18. A child man. He thought of all the replacements filtering into Easy Company. They were so damn young, just kids. At 18 he hadn't had to worry about killing or being killed, about bullets, or the smell of gunpowder. It was dances, chores, sports, fishing with friends.

His replacement troops, that sentry, this dark eyed youth on train, they got no chance to ease into manhood. Biting his lip, he wondered how long this boy had been a man. Months? Years?

The metro shook and clacked, black white black white, the lights strobed and the train hurtled down the track to ... wherever.

The sound of the boy's voice jolted him out of his reverie. Blinking his eyes into focus, he studied the youth. Sixteen, maybe seventeen, but those great sloe eyes were older, much much older, ageless. The train had stopped. Blushing faintly, he realized that the boy must be trying to tell him that this was the last stop and that he needed to get off.

Like an automaton, his feet took him up the stairs of the metro and into the cool night air by the riverside. In the distance, he could just make out the shape of Notre Dame cathedral, and wondered if he had taken the metro to come see it. He ambled along the footpath next to the black, greasy waters of the river. The boy hovered at his elbow, half a step back.

His rootlessness, his directionlessness, his loneliness must have shown on his face, for gently (but insistently) the youth tugged on his sleeve, speaking kindly, leading him along. Numb to the core he followed.

It was a building that had seen better days even before the war, grimy, plaster chipped, paint flaking off, wood worn and splintery. Up the creaking steps they went into a miserable garret. Lighting a fire on the grate, and setting a kettle on to boil, the youth rousted a younger version of himself out of a cot, unwrapped the parcel he had hugged so tightly on the train, revealing a loaf of dark bread. By the light of an oil lamp, the youth proceeded to tear off a chunk of the bread, giving it to his younger brother, who began wolfing it down, scarcely giving the presence of a uniformed American soldier in the house a second notice, before tottering back to his cot and falling right back into sleep.

Refusing the youth's offer of bread, motioning to show that he had a full stomach, he took a cracked mug of hot tea. On the wall opposite him hung two small photographs, a man and a woman. He supposed they must be the parents of these boys, dead, or at best, missing. He sipped the scalding, bitter tea as once again, thoughts began to play like a looped reel of film.

Warm fingers on his arm brought him back to the present. His blue eyes locked with brown and read the yearning desire therein, before tender lips hesitantly met his.

Thinking about many a hellfire and brimstone sermon, he put his arms around the thin frame and returned the kiss.

As they quietly hand in hand walked to a bed half hidden behind a curtain, he could see the pages of a bible in his mind's eye, and read the verses about the sin of sodom.

He saw the shape of the youth's body, white as bone, gleaming dimly in the near dark, and wondered about his body, with his tanned hands and face contrasting his own whiteness, and remembered the first girl he kissed, and the way the grass smelled on that picnic.

It all flooded through his mind as he lay down, warm body to warm body: army regulations, the way that queers were reviled, court martials, dishonorable discharges, the law, mental illness, the birds and the bees, dirt, shame, sin...

...and...

He didn't care. Those where the rules from places where the sun shone over long fields of green grass, and birds twittered in the sky, and tractors lumbered through fields of corn, where there were white picket fences and apple cheeked twin girls with carrot red hair next door. They were not the rules of a land where the smell of gunpowder was the norm, where men screamed for mothers thousands of miles away as they died, where the mud often had a lurid reddish hue from all the blood in it, where sheer luck doomed the fellow next to you to getting his brains blown out while you got the pink spatter of it all over your chest and face and some of it in your mouth to boot. Why not have sex with another man? It made about as much sense as anything else. This was not a green and sunlit land.

Different rules applied here.

Gentle, hot lips met his, a low voice whispered breathy words in a language he did not know, but he knew what they meant anyway, and hands roamed all over his body, knowing exactly where to touch, and he was whispering back to the youth, knowing that _he_ didn't understand a damn word of it, but knowing that his tone told the sloe eyed boy everything he needed to know as he returned the favor.

It was good to feel affection again.

It was good to feel a yearning body locked and straining against him.

It was good not to think again.

It was good to just be, if only for a little while.

Stars danced, red and yellow, in his vision as, panting, he came.

Moments later the youth shook and spurted between them.

He wakened, clean and dry, and slipped out of bed as the first hints of the coming dawn cast a silvery line along the rooftops. The boy had obviously wiped him down, but he had no memory of it. Strange to fall asleep that quickly or sleep that deeply.

Silently he dressed and left all but a few of his francs on the table. The boy had not wrapped the bread well enough, and rats had gotten to it in the night. If he offered the boy money, he knew the boy would refuse. Besides, this wasn't payment. It was a gift. He wanted the boy and his younger brother to have a few good meals at least, and really what else could he do for them? Wish that their parents were still here or that these two had a loving family to take them in? Wish that there were no wars and that boys (and girls) didn't have adulthood thrust upon them? He was a practical man and not given to pointless wishing.

He shut the door behind him, picked up his shoes, and tiptoed down the stairs. His 48 hours in Paris were over.

He had a train to catch.

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, there's a tense shift in the story, but I did it on purpose to suggest a shift in Winters' psyche. He's where he no longer has to live entirely in the present, but can reflect and think about the past.


End file.
